Provost column: the opposite of Harry Potter’s tent

Harry Potter’s friend, Ron Weasley, has a family tent that is small on the outside. But when you go inside, it is massive. It has bunk beds and a kitchen. (If you are more of a “Doctor Who” fan, the spacecraft TARDIS follows the same model.)

As provost, one of my ambitions is for Carolina to be the complete opposite of that tent! We should project massively to the outside world.

We graduated over 7,000 students this spring who will go out and leave their Heelprints on the world, joining nearly 370,000 living alumni. Our research has impact on the human experience across the planet, and we are engaged in deep service work across all 100 counties of North Carolina. In other words, we are large on the outside. But when we are at our best, we are a tightly connected and supportive community on the inside. Small, if you’d like.

In my previous column, I talked about my ongoing listening tour, where I am on a mission to learn as much as I can about this marvelous campus. One important takeaway from my tour is that we are far less siloed than what the common narrative suggests. In fact, there’s a perception in higher education that universities are deeply siloed — that meaningful collaboration across disciplines, departments and distances is rare and often difficult.

But what I’ve seen so far suggests otherwise. After visiting a dozen major academic units and meeting with faculty, staff and administrators, I’ve been struck by the volume and quality of collaboration happening across this campus. This matters since collaboration is key to building the opposite of Harry Potter’s tent. The challenges we are trying to solve, whether in health, technology or public policy, don’t fit neatly within a single discipline. Our ability to work across boundaries is essential to Carolina’s impact.

I would like to share a few noteworthy examples that I have encountered thus far during my listening tour.

At the Institute for Risk Management and Insurance Innovation and the School of Data Science and Society, faculty are co-developing and co-teaching courses that blend data analytics with real-world risk management. It’s a model of interdisciplinary work that prepares students to navigate increasingly complex challenges.

In the School of Nursing, I saw how digital innovation is expanding access to healthcare. One project, in partnership with colleagues at the Gillings School of Global Public Health, explores how drone-delivered defibrillators could dramatically reduce response times for cardiac emergencies. It’s an ambitious idea with real potential to save lives.

And at the Eshelman School of Pharmacy, I met a team that developed a deceptively simple device that uses artificial intelligence to improve the safety and precision of IV medication preparation. Developed with biomedical engineering students in collaboration with the College of Arts and Sciences’ exercise and sport science department, it’s a powerful example of how collaboration can lead to practical, life-improving innovation.

While these efforts span different fields, they share a common thread: They bring together expertise in ways that wouldn’t be possible within a single lab or disciplinary unit. And they make our campus feel smaller and more connected. In fact, what I kept hearing throughout my tour is that the barrier to collaboration is not structural. Nor is it resistance. It’s lack of awareness. We can’t partner on work we don’t know exists.

Creating more visibility across schools, departments and roles has the potential to unlock even more of this kind of innovation. And one of my goals in sharing these stories is to make that work more visible. And perhaps, in doing so, spark new connections across Carolina, tying us closer together. And making the tent smaller.

Provost’s log, stardate May 19, 2026.